An Exemplary Email

I just had the morning from….the Tim Horton’s line up at lunch time.

There was a train derailment yesterday which through Via Rail into a tailspin. My train from Georgetown, ON to Toronto, ON was 45 minutes delayed. Which, actually worked to my advantage because I forgot my power cord and wallet at home, but worked against me when I arrived in Toronto without my ticket for my new train (because I had to exchange tickets and left the old one in my purse, new one on my bulletin board so that I wouldn’t forget it.). Because we were 45 minutes late, I had enough time to hop on my train to Kingston just as the doors were closing, and couldn’t exchange my ticket.  Thankfully, the Via crew was understanding, and looked up my new ticket electronically.

When I arrived in Kingston, my cab driver was having an even worse day. On the way home from the Gun & Rifle club, the Taxi Commissioner caught him smoking in his car, and consequently tried to pull him over. The problem? My cab driver had ‘restricted firearms’ in his trunk and is not allowed to stop while transporting them from the gun range to his house. Consequently, he was handed a $500 ticket for smoking and a $500 ticket for failure to stop for an inspection, before he picked me up at noon.

I finally arrived at my house in Kingston with three bills due last week, and a note from my housemate saying that I owed $2 for something or other and a slightly wet comforter since I forgot to close my window during the snow storm over reading week.

Needless to say, I was feeling slightly overwhelmed and sorry for myself, until I opened up this email from one of my mentors, Julie.

Julie is an executive in Toronto and I have the pleasure of mentoring a team of budding entrepreneurs with her. Julie has two young children and a feisty teenager by the name of Diamante Development (http://www.diamantedevelopment.com/), in addition to her incredible amount of Board work in Toronto’s not-for-profit community.

When I finally sat down at my computer after unpacking, just as I was contemplating cancelling my afternoon meetings to enable some ‘recovery’ time, I saw this email from Julie:

“Woke up in the middle of the night because my son had a nightmare… Didn’t sleep after 330 am. Checked on both kids, read paper and dumb magazines until am. Made waffles from scratch, carried 3 year old downstairs while holding blackberry and empty sippy cups…

Drove a child to school, had a meeting at McDonalds near her school with a businessman.

Drove to Hazelton, bought undereye cover stick from Chanel, got roped into buying a cute dress because a business woman is always grateful for great service, bought a pair of blue pants because I didn’t get my clothes to laundry/cleaners on time, hemmed them in the office while I read materials on my desk, noticed my knee high was torn, turned it around, had assistant bring in chickpeas from a can for lunch with olive oil on it.
And, have a VIP mtg today.

Moral of the story… Its the best job in the world being self employed and, keep an extra pair of nylons and knee highs and a good quality sewing kit (hemming with cheap dollar store thread is impossible) and a under eye cover stick at hand at all times.

Xo

Did I mention tonight is music classes for the kids at home (I have to have all their things at home because I don’t have time to drive them anywhere).
Then put kids to bed and have our call and then catch up on work….
J”

Julie’s email immediately added context to my situation. Truly? My morning was a cakewalk compared to what she was up against.

In the process, I was reminded by the three E’s that help keep Julie in the penthouse, mentally, physically, and emotionally, instead of the basement.

Without further ado, here they are:

1. EARLY

I was surprised to see an email from Julie so late in the morning. Generally, her first email comes before 6:30 am. Julie is able to fit so much into her day because she’s increased the length of it. She’s also made it more productive by extending her time during daylight hours. Imagine how much more motivating it is to work with the sun coming up, as opposed to later into the evening.

1. EFFICIENT

Julie and I have a weekly conference call with our team of young entrepreneurs and they are typically the most productive of my week, all because of Julie. Julie doesn’t jump on a call without an agenda. Accordingly, she can be prepared and make the discussion more productive by having her points prepared in advance and redirecting tangents. Further, she requires that the agenda only include items that need a decision. Julie’s logic is that it is more efficient for the team to forward “FYI” items so they can read them at their convenience, as opposed to eating up face to face time.

1. ENTERTAINING

The email above from Julie? Not the first of its kind to cross my inbox. Julie never ceases to find the humorous side of situations, and share them with others to lighten up their days. If you don’t laugh, you cry. And in a down situation, it’s critical to keep a smile on your face. It’ll make the other guys wonder what you’re up to.

 

A huge thank you to Julie for inspiring this blog, and allowing it to be posted!

The Best Stress Reliever on The Market

by PLA  Roopa Suppiah

One of my friends asked me recently, “So, what do you do to relax or de-stress?”

I thought about it quickly and gave some pretty typical responses:  yoga, watching Glee, or listening to a Ted Talks. I didn’t realise until a while later that when I need a break, the thing that I turn to most often is actually calling home!

It’s very typical to hear about those university students who haven’t called home in about 3 weeks. Hearing that just boggles my mind, especially since I talk to my family on average 2 times a day! Sometimes it’s about 4 times, sometimes only once. But, there is not a single day that I haven’t called home, or my family hasn’t called me. Often, if my family hasn’t heard from me by the evening that day, they will give me a call to check up on me.

That may sound pretty crazy to a lot of people. However, it’s probably the one thing that keeps me sane in the chaos we call university life. When I call home, I talk about how my day went, I usually complain about a few things like the test I have coming up or how far behind I am, but it allows me to get whatever I’m feeling off my chest and I can move on after that.

Calling home and talking to family really gives me a dose of the outside world. Almost all of us get trapped in the university bubble, and I find that for me, talking to my family puts everything in perspective and sort of brings me back to reality. Though it’s sometimes hard to remember, life actually isn’t just about making all your deadlines.

Some people may feel ashamed to say that they call home so often, but please, don’t be! I believe it really is one of the healthiest things I can do for myself each day. If you aren’t close with your family now, maybe it will bring you closer.

If you are close with your siblings use them!  Whenever I have a dilemma, whenever I am unsure about a decision I have to make, or whenever I just need to be silly, I call my sister and everything seems to be better than it was before I called. Even if I haven’t solved the problem or figured out what decision I am going to make by the end of the phone call, I still feel better rationalizing it out loud. I like to hear opinions from someone I care about and whose opinions I value.

I do realise that these tips may not work for everyone, because family dynamics are definitely different from family to family. But, if you do have parents who want to talk to you, or siblings who are there to listen, use these valuable resources!

So, next time you feel like your head may pop off from the pressure that school brings, try calling home and see if it can do wonders –  like it does for me!

The optional course I didn’t know I was signing up for, Housing 101: How to live, share and breathe with your housemates

by Alanna Goodman   PLA

When I signed my lease last April I didn’t see the print at the top saying I was actually signing up for a housing course. And yet somehow I found myself using my academic lessons to get me through my housing ones and vice versa. This is what I have learned.

Communication. Just as your Profs and TAs cannot read your mind, neither can your housemates (unfortunately). I remember thinking, surely if I clean this microwave one more time they will understand to clean it when they make a mess. Nope! It’s far better to tell them if something’s bothering you right away. It prevents angry outbursts.

Taking responsibility. Getting a D back on an assignment is similar to coming home and finding a messy kitchen. How? Lots of people to blame! It’s so easy to tell yourself that the sinking feeling or bad smell is someone else’s fault. However upon taking a closer look at the situation, I found that I left a couple of plates in the sink this morning and I could have spent more time on the assignment. Understanding this made it easier for me to remedy the situation and move on.

Support. I never fully understood how important this was until I spent 6 months living with someone with a mental health disorder. We all have bad days and knowing there is someone who can help you get through them makes all the difference.

Would I do it again? Yes. Besides this is one course I’m sure I passed.

Don’t Wing your next Presentation – Wong it

by PLA Emily

Fewer things are scarier than presentations. In a presentation, there isn’t a speech-checker to automatically flag and remove crutch words. Although you can generally predict the level of understanding of an essay marker, you will seldom find an audience that has a consistent understanding of your topic. Finally, you can work on an essay and know exactly what the final product looks like, but you won’t know what a final presentation looks like until you are in front of your audience delivering it.

In the face of this adversity, it is tempting to relinquish all control and simply wing it. Blast through the deck, throw together some speaking notes, and hope for the best. At times you can rationalize this under the presumption that too many presentations are overly rehearsed and scripted. “Going without a script is the only way to avoid a canned response” you may argue. This would be a mistake.

The secret to great presentation delivery isn’t to wing it, it’s to Wong it.

Ken Wong is one of the School of Business’ crown jewels. As a teacher, Ken has received numerous awards for his courses in strategic planning, marketing and business strategy. Most recently, he was named an Inductee into Canadian Marketing Hall of Legends. In 1998, Ken won the Financial Post’s Leaders in Management Education award, a lifetime achievement award for his work in undergraduate, MBA, and Executive Development programs. He generally only lectures at Executive Education and MBA level programs but once a year, for a lucky 50 students, he delivers a weekly undergraduate marketing course called Advanced Topics in Marketing.

A better title would be Advanced Topics in Giving-Kick-Butt-Edge-of-Your-Seat-Oscar-Winning-Do-It-Again-Please Performances. Ken holds 85 social-media-and-Blackberry-addicted commerce students in absolute rapture for three hours every Wednesday night. Having had the pleasure of enjoying six of these lectures so far, I could not resist sharing some of Ken’s secrets of success.

Rule Number One: Make sure they are listening

Ken never starts a presentation if even one member of our class is so much as whispering. He stands in front of the podium, surveying the room, patiently waiting for it to quiet. His facial expression, a careful combination of bemusement and confidence, communicates the fact that we are only doing ourselves a disfavour by continuing to chatter.  Realizing that non-verbal trump verbal cues more times than not, Ken lets his actions do the talking. In doing so, he clearly communicates that what he is about to say is so important, he doesn’t need to demand our attention – the subject is matter is so critical its implied that we’ll sit up and pay attention.

Rule Number Two: Don’t Tell Facts – Tell Stories

Although entitled “Advanced Topics in Marketing,” if you were to walk into Ken’s class on any given Wednesday without knowing the title, you would never figure it out.

Ken doesn’t talk about the pitfalls of giving your employees directives instead of principles. Instead, Ken talks about his experience buying lingerie for his wife, and how what should have been a 15-minute-in-and-out-on-Christmas-Eve-speed-buy turned into the ‘most hellish 30 minutes of my life.’

You’ll never hear Ken speak about brands. Ask him about the ‘Telephone Rule’ though, and you’ll learn the difference between what friend you would call up for a yoga class vs. a flip-cup tournament. Just as how what your friends call you up for is your personality, what your customers would call you up for is your brand.

Finally, Ken rarely mentions market segmentation. Alternatively, he tells the story of how Viagra could sell for $0.10/pill as a blood thinner for heart patients, or for $30.00/pill in its current use. All because someone asked who has more pain, and realized people don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems.

Rule Three: Tell them three times

Through story-telling, real-life examples from client work, and actually stating the learning objective, Ken generally reinforces a point three times. So if you were laughing too hard the first time, trying to jot it down the second time, and finally were only able to listen the third time – somehow, it got through.

Sound familiar?

The great thing about Ken’s style is that it’s fairly easy to action. To make sure your audience is listening, try counting to three just after your professor has given you the go-ahead. During that time period, survey the room to make sure everyone is paying attention, and only when you have seen that everyone is focused on you, smile. Know that your audience is 100% focused on what you are about to say, and launch into your presentation.

From a story-telling perspective, pepper your presentation with as many real-life examples as possible. Try and pick out humorous examples, particularly from your own experience. They will humanize you in the eyes of your audience and give them something to remember you by.

Lastly, repeat your key points three times. Use an agenda at the beginning to provide an overview of what you will cover, deliver your material, and conclude with a quick hit-list of your key points. Three stooges, three little bears – it’s always three times a charm.

It’s Essentially Multiple Choice

by PLA Emily                                                 

I wanted to assure you that I was still alive after my last blog post. In hindsight, I may have blown things slightly out of proportion.

You gotta give me a break though – I’m in marketing: I’m essentially paid to make mountains out of molehills.  But, when you feel trapped under said mountain, you really just want a way out. A shovel, an air vent, and ideally – some dynamite.

In the post-mortem evaluation of what the hell happened though, it turns out what I really needed though, was just a choice.

When I was in the thick of it, I was struck by how suddenly the problem routed itself. Here I was, rolling along when BAM! mental breakdown hits full force. In the autopsy, I learned that what caused my ailment really shouldn’t have bugged me. I had not won things before, as my non-existent athletic record will attest to.

The only difference between this loss and my others?

I chose to let it explode. I chose to let it to erode my confidence in my career plan, my academic accomplishments, and my personal life. In reality, there’s no relation between performance in one competition on any given day and performance in any other aspect of my life. It was simply a bad day that I let morph into something worse.

Thankfully, due to an exceptional network of friends and family who painstakingly listened as I tried to sort through this mess, I was able to transform it into a new thesis on happiness. Ultimately? Happiness is like a multiple choice test.  It’s not your rationale that counts, but your final answer. It doesn’t matter how you get to that answer or how your friend gets to that answer or how your parents get to that answer as long as YOU get to the answer that works for you. The good news? You’ve got a 50/50 shot at being right, and if you’ve picked the wrong answer? It’s easy to erase and move on. You just gotta choose.

Life Needs an OnStar

The crash itself was stereotypically spectacular: me, alone, in a hotel room, in a random American city, balling my eyes out.

Not your typical Sunday night for a university senior.

All day I had been battling a mental maelstrom including not placing as well as I had hoped at a prominent business competition, questioning my after graduation employment plans, wondering why I had sacrificed so many personal things for something so materialistic, doubting if this is what ‘success’ looked like, and if so, if I really wanted it anymore.

Most importantly, I hated that I couldn’t deal with this myself, and that if I actually needed to speak to someone about it, I didn’t know who to call.  My crash didn’t come with an OnStar attendant at the other end asking if she could dispatch a career coach, a life coach, or just a tub of Ben and Jerry’s chocolate cookie dough – stat.

Part of it stemmed from not being able to remember if I had signed up for a long distance plan or not, and wondering if the lady at the front desk would be able to understand my query through my incessant tears. Part of it stemmed from my belief in stoicism and not wanting to let anyone see me down, and not being down in the first place. I’m a PLA after all! We, of all people, should be able to self-soothe our way out of just about anything stress related. Most of it stemmed from not wanting to talk about it because admitting what I was going through would mean I would actually have to face the music, and mute was looking pretty good right now.

Like an exploding suitcase, I attempted to pack all of my baggage back into wherever it was previously sitting. Today’s performance representing my school? Stuff under ‘lessons learned.’ After graduation employment plans? Jam beside ‘address once crystal ball goes mainstream.’ Not seeing as many family and friends as I would have liked in my last year of being a student ever? Can the ‘lessons learned’ pouch hold something that big?

Let’s be serious: carry-on zippers can only endure so much stress.

Steps away from giving myself a heart attack on the treadmill trying to run it out (I’d say run away but after the last melt down it’s not very satisfying running away from something when you are staying in one position) Steve called.

Steve has to be one of my best friends. He’s the type of guy who you meet for 5 minutes and it feels like 5 months. Since I’d known him for about a year, it seemed like a millennia

Poor Steve was just calling to say hi. It was one of those purposeless just call and catch up type dials.

I was lucky it was my digits he punched into his phone.

After the first hello, Steve knew something was wrong, and refused to get off the phone until I told him. He then sat there for a painstaking 20 minutes as I dumped everything on him and he talked me through it. As clichéd as it sounds (and you had to know it was going to be clichéd based on my opening line, right? I mean, something that starts off that stereotypical certainly can’t end with anything less than positively predictable) Steve’s call made all the difference.

I write this not purely for dramatic effect (although I hope that that may have happened so as to make my literary non-fiction professor proud) but to ask you: who’s call are you going to make?

In a world where emails, texting, and Facebook make instant communication a replacement for actual conversation, who have you actually spoken to? If Steve had texted me, emailed me, or IM-ed me, it likely wouldn’t have had the same effect. It’s too easily ignored and real emotions are too easily hidden.

A phone call? 9 times out of 10, they’re going to pick up and just be tone of voice you’ll know how they’re feeling.

It doesn’t need to be with a view of helping someone who you suspect is in trouble, or launching into a long-distance-plan-busting-marathon session with a long lost pal. Just think about who you haven’t spoken to recently, and give them a shout.

Life doesn’t come with OnStar. But that doesn’t mean you can’t check-in every so often to see how someone’s drive is going: whether to admire the scenery with them, or help them escape the wreckage.

Commerce Confidential: The Secret To Working In Teams

By PLA Gillian

Most first year business students are originally comforted to know that, in each of their classes, they’ve been placed in teams of other students to help them complete what’s been assigned to them.

But, they soon find that this frequent group work usually takes up more time and leaves them feeling more frustrated than if they’d had to complete an assignment by themselves.

In order to get the most out of group work here are 3 tips…

1. Make time for yourself.  It’s important to be a good group member, but it’s also important to remember that, despite its frequency, group work often accounts for a small portion of your overall grade.  If 20% of your term mark depends on group work, and the other 80% depends on midterms and exams that you write individually, be sure that helping your group members to understand the intricacies of an assignment question does not take away from the time you need to practice concepts individually.
2. Cut your losses.  Commerce students are busy and have little time to waste.  A professor once told me that “a done assignment is a good assignment”, and he was right.  Even if you’re not sure that you’ve finished a question correctly, hand the assignment in.  Losing 2 or 3% on an assignment worth only 5% is not going to substantially affect your grade; get the part marks for trying the question and then allow each group member to put their time to better use by going to the gym, catching up with a friend, or reviewing notes and readings.
3. Understand the importance of the questions assigned to a group.  A professor will rarely put questions on an exam that are harder than an assignment question because he/she knows that the assignment question took the effort of multiple brains to complete.  This makes assignment questions perfect tools for studying for midterms and exams – it’s all downhill from there!  If you’re going to hand in an assignment despite being pretty sure that one of your answers isn’t perfectly correct (see number 2), be sure you know the correct answer and how to get it before walking into an exam hall.

Keeping these points in mind will help you to rise above the stresses of team assignments.

Instead of feeling frustrated, you’ll be able to enjoy the ‘two heads are better than one’ benefit of working in groups!

Why is Busy a Bad Word?

By PLA Emily

The consensus right now is that being “busy” is unhealthy. Workaholism is seen as a disease and I’m counting down the days until a “Workaholics Anonymous” group pops up on campus. I figure Queen’s will have one of the first chapters. Western? The last.

Long-standing rivalries aside, I’ve been dubbed a workaholic by a number of acquaintances. Each of whom reminded me that I was going to “work myself to death” if I kept up the pace I was flying at. Honestly, if I had a dime for each time someone said, “Take a break” I wouldn’t have to work in the first place.

Since University is supposed to be a time when we’re open to new ideas, I thought I’d bite the bullet and give this “relaxation” stuff a try. Immediately after I secured full-time employment, I thought I would set myself on cruise control into the rest of the semester and enjoy not working.

My first Saturday being un-busy was the most stressful thing I have done. It started innocently enough. I went to the gym, read the paper at Starbucks. Browsed Indigo. Then boredom set in. I was out of things to do! Paranoia followed shortly thereafter – why was I trying to be someone who I wasn’t? Why was not doing anything so difficult? Why wasn’t there an agenda to finding bliss? Why was I wasting time trying to do something I don’t enjoy? In an effort to persevere, I pushed through and headed home to clean out the fridge, reorganize the cookbook shelf, and dust where no Swiffer had gone before.

That’s when it clicked that maybe I had missed the point of the whole ‘do nothing’ exercise. I wasn’t having fun. Then I started to wonder, if I enjoy being busy, is that such a bad thing? If I enjoy have a rigorous schedule that fits in an 80% average, going home once a month, seeing friends at least five times a week, and launching four start-ups, what’s the problem? Just because the rest of the world enjoys free time, do I have to too? If the point of having free time is to have fun, and I can have fun without free-time, why not just stay the course?

I’ll admit, my high-speed agenda has not been without a few near crashes. But as long as I take myself into the shop everyone once in a while for a tune-up, am I cleared for take off down the runway again?

Busy doesn’t have to be a bad word, as long as you are enjoying yourself.

Put some READING into your Reading Week!

By Aleks Bibic

Reading week is officially 5 days away…  So what are your plans?

• A nice, relaxing, week at home? Spending time with the family/friends, enjoying some post-midterm sleep, and catching up on your favourite TV series?

• A peaceful, housemates-free, 9 days of sleep-catch-up here in Kingston?

• A sun-soaked, shoes-optional, week of fun, beaching, and relaxation with your grad class, besties, or family?

• #OccupyLibrary to catch up on the work you haven’t been keeping up with/prepping for the midterms your professors (cruelly) scheduled for the week after reading week?

Whatever it is that you’re planning for Feb 18-26, don’t lose sight of what the week should be for.  Yes, it’s an academic break from Stauffer, Douglas, or the overly crowded Starbucks at Johnson and Division, but it is Reading Week!

This is by no means a lecture on the benefits of pouring over your [insert subject here] course-pack (believe me, I’m tucking my Stats text away for a few days); rather, it’s a healthy dose of encouragement to include some reading/literacy-based activity into each day of RW.  For those of you still unsure of what to read, here are a few ideas:

Beach, Bed & Bus-ride Reads:

• Each semester, we’re assigned more than our fair share of academic reading; because of this, it’s easy forget how enjoyable reading for the sake of interest can actually be.   Pick up that novel that you’ve been dying to read, but haven’t had the chance because of those regular weekly readings.  Whether you’re attempting The Odyssey, a Game of Thrones marathon, or a ‘trashy’ romance, just enjoy the feeling of living vicariously through the characters on the page.

SPORCLE. 

• If you haven’t yet discovered this online gem, reading week is the perfect time to do so!  Master the countries of the world, fill in the blank of song titles, or see if you can identify the logos of major sports teams or multi-national corporations.  Sporcle literally has thousands of different games/quizzes that you try to complete against the clock.  I was introduced to Sporcle this past fall, I’m now addicted.  And if I’m being honest, it’s so much more fun/productive than creeping people’s spring-break albums on Facebook.

From Ferraris to Ferragamo & Canon to Cambodia

• Pick up some magazines related to any of your non-academic interests (fashion, cars, world issues, photography, travel, adventure, sports, etc)—learn about the latest news in and stories from that field.  Alternatively, check out the web versions of magazines!  National Geographic is a favourite of mine—yes, it is my home page; there’s never a shortage of amazing adventure stories or albums of cities, countries, cultures, and foods that I would love to experience once my university debt is paid off!

Think Outside the Queen’s Bubble

• As university students, we face a great deal of academic and personal stress every day.  Maintaining healthy friendships and relationships, keeping an active social-calendar, and balancing extra-curriculars and part-time jobs, all while working to do well in our courses, is a lot to handle.  It’s easy to get wrapped up in our Queen’s bubble and forget about that great big world that exists outside of it.  Pick up a newspaper, or sort through a paper’s on-line articles and archives to catch up your current events.  Not only will you become a better-informed individual, but it’ll also be a great way to impress the family during dinnertime conversation.

Take Stock of your Progress this Semester

• Last, but definitely not least… Regardless of how academically stellar your semester has been thus far, take some time to look over your course work/notes and indicate the areas that you understand well, and those that still need some fine-tuning.  This will help keep your progress in check, and act as a reminder, in the coming weeks, of what it is that you DO know, and which areas you might need to seek some extra help before those finals!  Don’t forget about all of the learning resources available to you here at Queen’s (Learning Strategies, your professor’s/T.A.’s office hours, librarians, tutors, peers, etc.)—we’re in this together to support one another.

February is the month for Mental Health Awareness.  So whatever it is that you’re doing next week, please make sure you take the time to relax and rejuvenate your body, mind, and soul.

Safe travels, and happy reading!

What’s on your “list”?

by Heather Nichol PLA team leader

You know someone’s message is getting to you when they can make you cry one minute and laugh the next. That’s exactly what happened to me when I heard Drew Dudley speak at this weekend’s Queen’s Canadian Leadership Conference.

One message that really stuck with me was about the list: that mental list of things I have to do to be a success. In elementary school it was those stickers I got for doing well on a test; in high school it was everything that had to go into a perfect resume to get me a scholarship to the school I wanted; and now it’s the GPA and volunteer work to again fill that perfect resume to get me into my ideal grad school. But like Drew said, why I am living my life for a piece of paper?

Success isn’t just about how good you look on your resume; it’s about how much you matter to the people around you. It’s about taking the time for tea breaks with my housemates, for QP nights with the amazing friends I made on my floor in first year, and to volunteer doing things that I really believe in with people who I love to spend time with.

I think I’m going to be making a few changes to my list.